


Take Up Your Arms, Sons And Daughters

by gisho



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Pre-Canon, Transgender Characters, cult of the Dyne goddess, historical worldbuilding, in more senses than usual, speculative post-canon, warning: misgendering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-13 23:11:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16481549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gisho/pseuds/gisho
Summary: It's not a coincidence the Heterodynes so rarely produce girls - more of a tradition, really, that all their children are raised as sons. It didn't always work out, but it worked out for Barry.





	Take Up Your Arms, Sons And Daughters

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from a Decemberists song. The idea of the Heterodynes mostly being men for cultural, not biological, reasons, was originally purreve's. Thanks to namesaretoomuchpressure on discord for a readthrough!

\--

When he was born Ghengis the Ht'rok-din's son Knife wasn't called Knife. He wasn't called _son_ either. The priestesses of the Dyne sang and sacrificed ducks to honor the birth of their next chieftainess, and not until the child was five did the name Knife stick. What else would you call a child who threatened to stab anyone who got in their way?

"Our daughter is growing up so fast," the chief priestess and vessel of the goddess told the goddess's chosen consort, when he came back from Ithrinia Minor laden with treasure and threw the jeweled mask of the Ithrinian's bird-god at her feet, grinning like a cat. "I think she should dedicate these. She's past ready to learn our ceremonies, or she'll start following you to war out of boredom."

"Little Knife is doing well with her sword -"

"Talk to her."

But when Ghengis made the suggestion, Knife clutched at the obsidian dagger that was responsible for the nickname and said, "I can't. I won't be a priestess. Tell Mother that."

"Why not? The Dyne is a fine goddess. She rains destruction on our enemies. She is mighty and terrible and so should her avatars be."

Knife said, "But priestess are women, and I'm a boy."

The Ht'rok-din was so surprised at this announcement he dropped the necklace of golden fangs he'd meant to give to his daughter.

"I want to ride out and conquer with you," Knife went gamely on. "And I want to hear the Ithorians wailing in despair and crush their skulls beneath my boots, and I want to call down the lightning with my sword and hear my warriors cheering, and I don't want to learn sacred chants and I don't -"

No one could accuse Ghengis the Ht'rok-din of dithering, or of stubbornness. He picked Knife up in a bear hug. "My son," he said. "You are my son Knife and my heir and I will teach you to bring _conquest and woe_."

That was more or less that; nobody argued with the Ht'rok-din. It was the start of a long tradition.

\--

When she was born Eris the Ht'rok-din was called Eris right away, but not _she_. It was, her father inaccurately said, the name of a war-god of the Greeks. An auspicious name. 

A prophetic one, at least. The Ht'rok-din's altars no longer bent the skin of the earth; making war meant tedious mapmaking and coordination and provisioning, knowing how much one hunter could carry and where they could hunt and how far they could walk in a day carrying the disassembled parts of a siege engine or extra cases of flash powder, what caves supplies could be left in undisturbed, what weapons weren't worth the weight to loot. Eris excelled at logistics. While the Ht'rok-din Ek'rejis, who would be listed in histories someday as Egregious Heterodyne, finished the new stone walls atop Mekhan Tor, Eris took the Jägers to the Iron Gates and came back with incense and wine and the promise of copper as soon as packhorses could be found.

The Dyne changed course with the summer thunderstorms. What had been a fordable stream was a roaring river by the autumn when the raiders returned; it took a day to fell trees for a bridge. A lake, glowing faintly in the night, filled in the valley where their longhouses had stood. In the new camp, Eris's wife had just been delivered of a healthy baby boy, and Eris's mother lay dying from the bite of a cave-slime, driven to the surface when the Dyne flooded its home.

"It was only a spring," she whispered. "We should never have asked for more. The Goddess always has her price."

"Father blew up the spring nineteen years ago," Eris pointed out, and kept rubbing her cold hands. "Before I was born. You'd think she would have called in the debt a little sooner."

"You'd think we would have finished her new temple faster. Maybe she got tired of waiting." The laugh was like a death rattle. "Our goddess is gone, and we drove her away. I never anointed your girl with spring water and taught her the ceremonies. I'll die, and no one will remember the funeral chants."

"Teach me the funeral chant, then," Eris told her. "At least we'll get that much right."

The last priestess was buried ten days later, inside the stone walls atop Mekhan Tor that the Ht'rok-din's followers were already calling 'the fortress' instead of 'the temple'. Ek'rejis blubbered inconsolably, stealing so many sips from a little glass bottle it should have been empty five times over. Eris sang the funeral chants, in the white robe and painted mask of a priestess, and went on to spend the winter in a brooding sulk and a beaded gown, and the people who said anything concluded that grief does funny things to the brain and there was no point arguing with wizards. 

Next summer the Ht'rok-din's hunters went down the Danube, and twenty towns swore allegiance to Lady Eris. 

Fifty years later, Lady Eris died in bed and was buried beside her mother. 

Her wife and their three sons wailed in inconsolable grief, but no one gave the funeral chants; no one remembered them. In less than a generation the Ht'rok-din's Fortress, that no one called a temple anymore, blew to pieces, and the tombs were buried deep in the rubble.

\--

Caligula was called Alexander by her father, Cassandra by her foreign mother as a token act of defiance. When she was twenty her father died, falling drunk from a tower in newly-conquered Bucharest. She exiled her mother, declared she'd raze Bucharest with dragonfire, and retreated to her laboratory to build the necessary dragon, pausing only to tell the Butcher's Guild to ready fifty beasts for roasting for her coronation feast.

"Excellent idea, master," her seneschal said. "Will there be dancing?"

"After they get through the wine, I'm sure. Get two hundred casks."

"We don't have -"

"Go around to the villages and tell them what happened to Budapest. Tell them," she said in a sudden streak of inspiration, "it's their tax contribution, because they're my empire now. Oh, and find the best baker and have him brought back too, we should do honeycakes."

Her seneschal said, "Yes, Master," with the beaming smile of a man who liked his sweets. 

It was the captive baker, of all people, who finally convinced her what name to use. She'd known _Alexander_ didn't feel right, but the name her mother gave her felt like treason, after all her mother had done to try to poison her mind against Mekhanburg. She was the Hetrokdyn. "You're a madman," the baker screamed at her, when they hauled him before her in chains. "Vicious beast! Salter of the earth! You might as well be called Caligula!"

When she got done laughing she told the baker, who by now was sobbing with terror, "You're absolutely right."

"But -"

"And thank you for the suggestion. You know, I think I'll let you live."

It turned out, quite a lot of people remembered the name Caligula. Combined with sending the less bloodthirsty Jägers to oversee tax collection, it kept her imperial subjects in a healthy state of constant fear; they turned over wine and grain and the occasional master craftsman without complaint. It was, Caligula decided, a pleasant way to run an empire, even if the Jägers grumbled about being bored. She was even magnanimous enough to forget about destroying Bucharest, once they sent her a wagon of silver. She kept working on the dragon, though.

It was beautiful and golden and stupid as a box of rocks. Her bored Jägers got to live up to their name for once, fetching deer to feed it; she began adding cattle to the rolls of tax demands. Someday, someone would miss a payment. Then she'd have an excuse. In the meantime, she dressed in fine gowns and golden jewelry, and threw tremendous parties every year on the anniversary of her ascension, and tried to earn her borrowed reputation. 

It was ten years before a rather stupid wizard in Apipolis decided he had practical anti-dragon measures, kicked out the town council, and refused tribute.

He did not, it turned out, have practical anti-dragon measures, and before too long there was no such town as Apipolis. Caligula did bring the wizard back to Mekhanburg in one piece; she'd decided having talent on both sides of the bloodline couldn't hurt her children. She kept him alive, pleading for the sweet release of death between bouts of experimentation, until she was sure she was pregnant and past the treacherous first three months. Then Caligula cut off the relevant parts to keep on ice, and left him to slip away from blood loss.

"Should we put his head on a spike, master?" her seneschal asked. "As a deterrent?"

"For who exactly? I think the story will spread on its own." She wrinkled her nose. "Give him to my dragon. The poor thing must be getting tired of deer."

Stupid as it was, her dragon was loyal. Caligula died in bed at a great age. Her dragon went mad with grief and began to rampage through Mekhanburg; it was her new seneschal who finally put a sword through its head. They added a statue atop her tomb to remember the unfortunate beast. It was, everyone agreed, what Caligula would have wanted.

\--

When he was born Igneous Heterodyne was tiny and blue, and the handful of Jägers who had turned up for moral support murmured and prepared to offer their condolences to his father. Hephaestus Heterodyne, still gasping and exhausted, didn't give them time. Instead he demanded that they be carried down to the spring. It took an awkward hundred breaths of argument as to how, exactly, they were going to get the bed down the secret passage, before Axel hit Goomblast over the head with a chair and the midwife pointed out that the chair would fit down the secret passage just fine. 

The midwife went with them, cradling the newborn in her arms, and didn't hand him back to Hephaestus until Hephaestus had been helped down to the stone by the water's edge. His father, arms shaking with exhaustion, lowered the baby into the Dyne, still wrapped in a blood-smeared towel. The midwife breathed in hard. Hephaestus was the Heterodyne and held all their lives for the asking, but surely drowning a child wasn't the kind of sacrifice the Dyne needed.

Three breaths later he lifted a tiny pink baby from the water, and the cave was filled with an awful, familiar wailing.

"Miraculous healing," Hephaestus smugly declared. "Still works."

Igneous grew up cheerful and insatiably curious. He would combine every set of two chemicals in the lab, or wander up to the castle towers to make drawings of the motion of planets. Not until he was twenty-four and had shown no inclination toward it at all did Axel ask, "Have you ever thought about getting married?"

"I don't want to," Igneous answered. He could never be bothered to lie. "No point. Besides, who'd want me?" He lifted the hem of his gown to demonstrate. 

"Well, you'd better arrange for children somehow or the Castle will never shut up." He wasn't giving it ideas; they were in the Jägerhall, and Hephaestus's relentless tunnel-building hadn't yet given it eyes so far from the spring. "It likes to know there's going to be more Heterodynes. You're an only child."

"Well, that's not surprising, is it? I've heard all Father's horror stories." Igneous gave a theatrical shudder and reached for his tankard. 

Axel sighed. He had to assume the boy hadn't reached twenty-four, not to mention bedding a goodly number of Axel's brothers, without knowing basic biology, but _common sense_ was probably too much to ask from a wizard. "It'll be easier for you," he pointed out. "Find a woman, and she'll do the tricky parts. You won't have to look too far. There's lots of ladies right here in town who'd volunteer."

"Brave ladies," Igneous muttered, with a roll of his eyes. "It'd be easier if we could bud off like mushrooms." But he was no biologist, and knew it; by the end of the winter he'd started asking around, and in five years, Hephaestus had six grandsons with four different mothers. 

\--

Vanamonde was the name Venthraxus Heterodyne suggested for his new little brother, mainly because he liked the sound of it and partly because Mother was coming up with a bunch of suggestions in Skraali that he couldn't pronounce. He couldn't, according to Mother, pronounce his _own_ name properly. Or hers. Not that anyone called her by name; she was 'dread queen' to her minions and 'my darling little dumpling' to Father. Venthraxus didn't understand grownups sometimes. At least they took his suggestion.

Venthraxus was six then. He was nine before Vanamonde, in his considered opinion, started to be interesting - when chewing on tributes of gold jewelry was supplanted, or at least supplemented, by repeated questions about where it came from. Father answered them cheerfully, and the questions about how he'd conquered the towns they came from, and the questions about how Jägers were made, and the questions about other kinds of constructs, and the questions about the Dyne ducks. Vanamonde fell fast asleep before he could finish a question about dragons. Father sighed and gave Venthraxus's hair a ruffle. "Your brother's going to be quite the philosopher."

"Good," Venthraxus said. "He can build siege engines for me."

But as he grew older Vanamonde was mostly interested in living things. Can rafter toads be trained to bite? What thornbushes grow fastest, and what accelerates the process? How potent a smell can hypsanium be distilled to? Venthraxus got to help dispose of the results of that one - the answer seemed to be, strong enough to drive Father's minions insensible with terror - and he couldn't help but scowl as he rinsed his hands off with vinegar afterward. "What are you going to be like when your wizardry comes in? Are you going to try to breed dragons?"

"Don't be silly. Everyone knows they have to be hand-hatched." Vanamonde blinked owlishly; he had big eyes and sometimes his brother thought there was something wrong with them, from the way he blinked so much. "I'm going to breed Jägers."

" _What?_ " 

"Oh, not like that, I just mean I want to get as good a genealogy as we can of the whole kin, and of all the volunteers, and see if maybe we can figure out who the draught's going to work right on." Van crossed his arms. It made him look very serious, but it didn't make him look any older than eight. "Or maybe we can just _make_ it work. Like Heterodyning."

There were times Venthraxus was convinced his little brother was smarter than him by a factor of at least one-and-a-half, and this was turning into one of them. "I don't know what you mean. Isn't that just, you know, something that runs in the family?"

"But it's _always_ ," Van muttered, and wrinkled his nose. "I think Father has a secret ritual and he's going to take you away sometime and give you a potion and then you'll start Heterodyning. And then he'll do it with me when I'm old enough. Maybe that's when I get my boy parts, too."

Venthraxus managed, "Boy parts?"

"Well, _obviously_ I'm going to get them someday or I wouldn't be your little brother. I'd be your little sister." _You idiot_. he didn't say, but it was obvious from his voice.

Someday his little brother was going to raise vast armies of venomous ferrets or something and Venthraxus was going to point in the right direction and yell, "Kill!". Or in the wrong direction. He just hoped Jägers were immune to ferret venom. "I don't know," was all he could say. "Father hasn't said anything to me."

Not long after that Father and Mother had an argument he couldn't make out most of the words of, just the sounds of furniture slamming into the walls, and one shriek of, " _She always was!_ ". By next day's breakfast they were acting like newlyweds again, though, so Venthraxus put it out of his mind. He was completely astonished when he walked into Mother's studio for sword practice and found his brother sitting on the small-arms chest in a dress. It was a perfectly ordinary madder-red smock, the kind little girls in the marketplace wore. There was a red ribbon in his hair.

"Oh, sweetiepie, this is your sister Vipsania," Mother said, as if he met previously unsuspected sisters every day.

Vana - Vipsania added, "Probably your sister. I don't know for sure. It's an experiment."

Venthraxus turned this over in his head. It made sense, of a sort. Most people called them daughters when they had children with V - Vipsania's sort of body, even in Mechanicsburg, and where Mother was from it was probably universal. "What kind of a name," he said faintly, "is Vipsania?"

"Skraali," Mother said. Her voice didn't invite argument. 

It was a successful experiment. Vipsania grew up, and came into her powers, and made giant hornets for her brother to frighten enemies with and a giant thornbush to defend the town. And it only took a few months before her brother no longer stuttered out the wrong syllable at the start of her name. 

\--

When Lazarus Heterodyne was born, his father ordered free pie for the entire town in celebration, his mother came up with the name and then fell asleep for two days, and his great-aunt asked if the name was really a good idea. Robur had grown up listening to Vipsania about the town defenses, but he only laughed at her question. "All Heterodynes are boys. It's traditional."

It was an absurd thing to say to his Heterodyne aunt. It wasn't accurate even if he meant _ruling_ Heterodynes; there had been Caligula. But Robur was the ruling Heterodyne and Lazarus's father, and Vipsania bit her tongue. 

Lazarus was old enough when his brothers Marijan and Miltiades were born to have broken through, and to have grown heartily sick of the Castle asking about descendants. He knew he didn't care to go as far as Hephaestus had. "Look," he told it, "if I make my brothers immortal, will you stop asking us about children ever again?"

"You could make yourself immortal too," it told him, with that low grinding of stone he'd always taken for grumbling.

"It works better on infants." He hoped. He thought. He'd only _tested_ it on ducklings, but the bird-to-beast modifications were out of Silviescu and presumably had worked before. "Deal?"

"I'll need proof," the Castle said.

Well. That sounded like a _challenge_.

It turned out dying repeatedly was amazingly invigorating. And the Castle never did bring up the idea of Lazarus having children again.

\--

With Euphrosynia, it was obvious by the age of four she was a girl, early enough that her parents shrugged and scribbled 'Euthymios' off the family record in the chapel. Most noble families would have started hunting for a marriage alliance. The Heterodynes, traditionally, went it alone. Oh, they had tributaries who wanted part of the pie, they had other Thinkomancers who wanted technical aid, but there was no one whose favour _they_ had to curry. It was nice having an empire. Euphrosynia could have married a Mechanicsburger, or a handsome prisoner-of-war spared from her test slab. 

So it was a shock to her brother when she told him, "I'm going to marry the Storm King."

All Bludtharst could say was, "I don't think he'd move to Mechanicsburg."

"I don't think he knows I'm the heir. So manly of him." She fluttered her eyelashes. "But he's handsome, and he has those lovely Muses. I think it could work out. At least it will be an interesting game, convincing him it was his idea all along." 

The Storm King, it turned out, was persuadable. Euphrosynia sent him secret letters by messenger-crow. When he demanded her hand to seal the treaty, she smiled and her brother hid a smirk. In the fortress of Sturmhalten, the clank-maker Van Rijn paced and tore at his hair and ranted to Muses that this was all going to end in disaster.

"Protect her," the Storm King said to Otilia, when the treaty was signed. 

Her wings fluttered, a sign of agitation to make up for the porcelain mask of her face. "My king -"

"This is an order. _Protect the Heterodyne girl._ "

"Yes, my king," Otilia said. She could say nothing else; she was the Storm King's muse. If he had been a little more careful with his wording, if he had said _Protect Euphrosynia_ \- it would have changed nothing then. It might have changed things two hundred years later.

But why would he? There was only one Heterodyne girl; there had not been another for seventy years, and there would not be another until Agatha Heterodyne.

\--

Teodora Vodenicharova was waging a secret war. She had to lose a few battles. She could only push so hard. When Saturnus beamed down at her newborn second child and said, "You liked Barry, didn't you? We'll call him Barry," she didn't argue the point.

Barry never argued the point either. _It's just how Heterodynes are_ seemed to be enough explanation for why his body looked different from his brother's. Besides, in Mechanicsburg no one argued with the Heterodyne.

He was fourteen when they went - fled - to Beetleburg, a normal university town ruled by a normal madboy, and fourteen was young enough for the differences not to show. Over the next few years Barry learned disguise. He needed the glasses anyway; that they distracted from his face was a bonus. What few curves showed on his stocky body vanished beneath thick, boxy waistcoats. It wasn't hard. Most people just didn't pay attention. 

And besides, there were other things they paid attention to. The name was the first; people tended to find other places to be once they introduced themselves. "Do you think we should just have called ourselves Schmidt?" Bill muttered in exasperation, as they left a crowded medical demo where the bench to either side of them had still, mysteriously, been vacant.

Barry shook his head. "Defeats the purpose. We can't redeem the family name if nobody knows what it is."

"Maybe we should have started a little later," Bill said. But he didn't bring up the idea again.

They had one friend, at least; Klaus Wulfenbach had run into them on their first day in Beetleburg and stuck to their side with the stubborn intensity of someone trying to prove a hypothesis. _Heterodynes aren't immediately deadly_ , maybe. He took the bench next to Barry in the necrochemistry lab Bill had sheepishly turned down in favor of History of Construct Biology. He brought them books after that unfortunate difference of opinion with Professor Weitzel. And when Doctor Homlogus got sick of waiting for Professor Weitzel to approve his tenure and let loose a flock of lizard-creatures in the library, he helped them set the nets.

"Good thing you had all those clockwork snakes," Barry told him, as they cautiously lifted their heads over the upturned reference shelf.

The coast was clear; the last three creatures were lying stunned in a pile beneath their last net. Klaus began brushing the plaster out of his hair. "This university is infested with idiots," he said.

Barry couldn't disagree, but - "Wasn't that fun, though?"

"It was stupidly dangerous, absurd, and completely unnecessary," Klaus said, which wasn't actually a _no_ but was a good indicator of his mood. 

It didn't keep Klaus from helping out when the entomological coallator went haywire, though. Bill and Barry hadn't even been in the building for that; they'd been at the medical lecture next door when a disheveled lab assistant had burst in screaming, and somehow it seemed they were the default Sparkwork-wranglers at TPU, now. Not a bad thing. Klaus went so far as to invite them home for Yule, but he turned down the offer to travel with them after graduation. That was fine; they had a plan now. Punch and Judy were coming with them. They went from town to town dealing with trouble, asking for nothing in return but supplies and a safe place to sleep off the acid burns.

They were rebuilding the water cannons at Gervertzfall - beautiful work, really, it was just a shame about the rustproof coatings - when Klaus turned up again. So did one of the Mongfish daughters with a horde of piranhas, so they had an interesting time, but it worked out in the end; she fled, cursing their name, and Klaus joined Bill and Barry at the celebratory feast of fried apple dumplings. "Is it like that all the time?" he asked them, staring at his goblet of cider like it was a well of prophecy.

"Oh no," Bill sighed. He sounded wistful. "We don't usually get to fight beautiful girls." Strike that, he sounded besotted.

It must have hit Klaus top, because he turned to Barry, face screwing up into something like a scowl. "He's gone mad."

"Just a little lovesick," Barry assured him.

"Please tell me you have more sense. One of you must have more sense."

Barry could only shrug. He'd never understood the appeal of romance, at least like most people did it. Wanting a best friend, he understood; it was just that people seemed to spend so much time playing games and trying to look pretty or prove themselves with fancy gifts instead of saying exactly what they wanted. 

His brother, though, seemed to have caught the fever. At university he'd brought girls back to their rooms, but never the same girl more than a month running. This time, he spent the next month sighing over Serpentina Mongfish and how clever she was and how well-bred her piranhas were, until Klaus, who'd decided to travel with them for a while even though they could almost guarantee it wouldn't be boring, was visibly fuming every time the syllable 'Ser' emerged from Bill's lips. Bill noticed, of course, and took to imparting trivia with particular phrasings - "You know, Klaus, _cer_ tain types of songbird in the Po Valley use sound-based hypnosis to lure prey. Very simplified form, of course."

"I know I'd like to hear some peace and quiet."

"Sure. Whatever you want."

Barry was more sympathetic to Klaus's position, really, but out of brotherly feeling he did tell Klaus later that night, "I'm not going to complain if they hook up. It'd make my brother happy. He gets lonely."

"And the piranhas?"

"Given how some of our ancestors got together? Not necessarily a bad sign. Look, every time we go home the Castle starts complaining that we havn't given it heirs yet. The sooner he finds a lady to settle down with the happier I'll be." 

He should have remembered better this was _Klaus_ he was talking to. His friend gave him a long look over the campfire, flames flickering on his face. "And finding a lady for yourself?"

"Isn't going to happen," Barry told him, flat and firm as he could manage. Not open to discussion. It must have worked; Klaus just sighed and went back to poking the fire with a stick, in the same distracted way humans had probably been doing as long as there had been campfires.

There wouldn't have been, even if he expected anyone outside Mechanicsburg to understand.

Which wasn't to say no one tried. Time went by, the Mongfish daughter made no reappearances, and Bill eventually gave up mentioning her at every excuse in favor of flirting madly with whatever lady looked friendliest in every town they stopped in, and vanishing upstairs with any who flirted back hard enough. Barry didn't flirt, but he got used to listening to "So what are _you_ doing tonight?", and "We're so grateful you took care of the giant slime for us, let me show you just how grateful", and "Oh, you look so young and handsome!". He gave one lady his usual thanks-but-no, only to find half an hour later a man who, by looks, must have been her younger brother, whispering an invitation into his ear. Barry removed the hand from his ribs, gave another thanks-but-no, and wearily signalled for another beer.

If it were a hundred years ago, if they planned to spend their lives holed up in Mechanicsburg like dragons on a hoard - well, Barry still wouldn't have had any interest, but he might have made different calculations. It might have been nice to have a son of his own. There were Heterodynes who'd managed it. Someone he could teach about the systems of the world, who would listen to Barry ramble about gear ratios and surprise him with a helper clank to fetch tools, who'd be amazed while he listened to Van Rijn's Conjectures for the very first time, who Barry could bring up to be better than their ancestors. Which was, of course, the sticking point. Right now it was up to _Bill and Barry_ to be better than their ancestors. And if Bill found a nice girl and settled down and had kids with her - which Barry hoped that he would, he wanted his brother to be happy, and nephews would be nice even if sons weren't going to happen - it would still be up to Barry. They'd decided to show the world a better kind of Heterodyne; that needed to happen face to face.Barry took his third beer up to the attic, rather than risk interrupting Bill, and got just as little sleep that night as he'd expected. 

It was working, though. It proved nothing that people were hospitable after Bill and Barry had taken care of that irritating nest of giant centipedes or worked out why their drawbridge was launching every tenth cart into the clouds, but when an actual _messenger_ turned up, begging them to come to Klosphilck and make their new Spark see reason - they would have had a celebratory toast, if they weren't so busy hurrying to Klosphilck.

Eventually, people stopped being afraid of the Heterodyne brothers. 

Eventually people started telling stories where the Heterodyne Boys were the heroes.

Over the next few years Klaus kept turning up, until he was with them almost as often as Punch and Judy. He wasn't the only one. There were constructs who stuck with them after the unpleasant Sparks who made them were defeated, and left when they found a city whose inhabitants didn't look at them funny. A prince from Arabia who had the most wonderful knack for clanks helped them out with that mess in the Castle of the Green Giant, which was apparently adventure enough to whet his appetite. They kept meeting a tiny African who was trying to see the whole world, adventure optional, but pretty much inevitable. They even found a Spark from the Americas, who'd crash-landed in the Alps in a giant mechanical bird of her own creation. "What's next, a Martian?" Klaus muttered, but when she asked for his help rebuilding it, he agreed without hesitation. 

It took two complicated, fascinating years, but in the end Thundering Engine Woman flapped away while they stood by the steam catapult and waved farewell. Klaus watched until she was out of sight on the mist-shrouded horizon. Then he turned to Bill and said, "So where are we going next?" 

Klaus was with them so much now, he felt like a third brother. That was probably why Barry got careless. 

People didn't see what they weren't looking for, most of the time. Boxy clothes and a masculine name and a little extra physical modesty, and he'd never had to explain how things worked in Mechanicsburg, for the Heterodynes, which was just as well because who would have believed him? But he'd flat out forgotten that Klaus was an outsider, and here they were with Klaus staring firmly at the dissolving remnants of his trousers instead of the blue-edged gash on his thigh that Barry actually _did_ need help with _right now_ and going, "Um."

"Shut up and get the polythriacline," Barry told him through gritted teeth. 

Klaus did as he was told. Not until they'd collapsed the slime mold's maze, everyone had hosed off the evidence, and Bill had gone off with Punch to make sure he'd gotten all the charcoal out of his back, did Klaus quietly ask, "I didn't know you were - um."

"Were what," Barry growled. He'd liked those trousers, dammit. 

"Bill always called you his brother."

If Judy were here she'd have some sensible explanation, but she, sensibly, had gone to set fire to the slime vats. Barry was going to have to muddle through this on his own. "Because I am," he says. "Always have been. It's just how things are, Klaus."

Klaus looks fretful. "There's a spark in Paris who does biological work - I've heard of her dealing with a few cases of people who got the wrong sex, just rumours, you know, but it wouldn't be theoretically impossible -"

"I've heard of her too." Barry rubbed his temples. "There are plenty of Sparks who do biological work. If it mattered that much to me, I'd ask your mother. She knows how to keep a secret. But it _doesn't matter._ Alright?"

"Fine," Klaus said. He was glaring at the middle distance in that way that Bill kept teasing him about, the look of a man who just wanted the world to make sense, already. "Forget I said anything."

"Forgotten," Barry told him. He wasn't going to go after his friend for a little human curiosity, and besides, Klaus hadn't said anything unforgivable, hadn't used the word _woman_ or said that it didn't matter to him, as if it were any of his business, really.

And Klaus never mentioned it again, right up to the day he vanished.

\--

Barry stumbled back to Europa with a unconscious child stuffed in his backpack and his head ringing, a constant dull pounding of _My brother is dead_ and _Lucrezia did this_ and _Klaus helped_ that even Heterodyning couldn't drown out, repeating with every throb of blood. It stayed there while he found a cave, on autopilot, checked - the Holy Child, who needed a better name - for any injuries more severe than the bruising he already knew about, went over the floor with a dialed-back deathray for heat rather than risk a fire, and fell unconscious with the child still fast asleep on his chest. It was still there when he was awakened by desperate childish wailing. It stayed while he sleepwalked through the next three days, by the end of which he'd disabled the traps of an abandoned hunting cabin and made a half-decent meal from the jerky and dried oats left inside, and they fell asleep under an actual blanket in front of the fire.

Barry woke up to the peculiar silence of falling snow and the realization that he had to think of something to do next. He still had his notebook. He could make a list of problems. It was an old trick.

 _Find a better name for the Holy Child_ only made its way back into Barry's mind on round two, a subproblem of _Vanish into ordinary society_ that was a solution to _They'll hunt us_. Bill and Lucrezia hadn't talked much about names, with their first; they'd settled on Klaus Barry with the confidence of he wasn't going to think about that it would only hurt he needed to keep calm. Right. 

They'd mentioned Agatha, for a daughter. They'd assumed a daughter was a _possibility_ , not just in four or five years if she insisted, but from birth. One more tradition to overthrow. Barry hadn't protested. Mechanicsburg couldn't afford to be so insular anymore. People would wonder.

And now - they wouldn't be in Mechanicsburg anytime soon. It would be too hard to explain. It might as well be Agatha, for a daughter.

It occurred to him, looking down at the sleeping child with her shock of golden hair, that the Geisterdamen will be looking for a little girl and a _man_.

He passed through three settlements, fixing mechanisms for travelling money and spinning tales about a housefire to explain his general disarray and Agatha's babbled, incomprehensible distress, before they reached a town big enough to have a market where nobody notices all their customers, and where a man buying a skirt and blouse is completely forgettable. Back at the inn he barred the door and drew the curtains. "I don't know why I'm bothering," he told Agatha. "The Ghost Ladies would scare off anyone they tried to ask nosy questions."

"Gosladies," Agatha said, as if she were tasting the unfamiliar word. She wriggled her nose and followed up with, "Shrshka d' vrik?"

Screaming wouldn't help, so Barry didn't. He took deep breaths while his niece declared, "Honu," and went back to trying to balance an empty cup on top another empty cup.

The skirt felt - wrong. Barry walked around the room a few times, trying to desensitize himself to the sensation. On the third round he started to hum, in case it was the swishing noise that was so disturbing. On the fifth round he gave up and sat down on the bed to read. The skirt went all the wrong places, and almost tripped him sitting down despite being not quite down to his ankles.

This wasn't going to work, Barry thought. He'd look like a man in a dress, and feel like it, and people would notice something was wrong even if they couldn't say what. Back to the original plan, then. Travelling tinker and his orphan niece, family name - variable. The most important thing was not to attract attention.

Watch and wait.

Getting out of the skirt seemed to take an inordinate amount of wiggling, and for a moment Barry felt guilty about what he was setting his niece up for. But then, he reminded himself, most people didn't look past the words 'he' or 'she'. Plenty of adventuring ladies wore trousers without attracting a second glance. Who knew? Maybe in ten years it would be fashionable.

And the rest, the awkward bundle of stupid assumptions … well, it was generally a good thing to be underestimated. 

\--

"Lilith," the Heterodyne announced. "After my mother." There was steel in her voice, despite the exhaustion, and she held her daughter cradled close to her chest in the overprotective way of very new mothers everywhere. The baby's hair was a barely-there dark fuzz. Agatha's hair was a mess. 

The Castle answered with the whine of scraping metal. "Mistress, Adam is a perfectly lovely -"

" _Heterodyne,_ " Agatha snapped, the traditional answer to its wheedling by now.

It managed to sound sulky and hurt. "It's traditional. Besides, you don't know for certain. Eris didn't work out she was a lady until she was seventeen and married. That sort of thing goes both ways."

It's not the most ridiculous point. Still. "I'm playing the odds, then," Agatha wearily told the Castle. "This is my daughter Lilith until and unless she tells me otherwise, and you are going to _shut up about it_ and _let us sleep_. Understand?"

"Fine," it muttered.

The midwife, beaming with the pride of, well, a Mechanicsburger at the birth of the next Heterodyne, brushed the sweaty hair away from Agatha's cheek. "Shall we ring the bell now, mistress?"

Agatha said, "Yes."

The noise reverberated through Mechanicsburg, a deep note that yanked on the hindbrain of everyone who heard it, vast and impossible as the knowledge of inevitable death. In the Great Hospital the doctors staggered and cursed the Castle's sense of drama. In hotels, tourists fainted and locals gasped, knowing that the heir they'd been waiting for was here, it was time for celebratory toasts and, as soon as their lady made the announcement, the hasty production of souvenir mugs. At the Jägerhalk the cheer rattled the roof. At Mamma Gkika's the stomping feet made the whole building shake, hard enough to make people in the street above wonder if the Doom Bell had set off an earthquake.

In the donjon of Castle Heterodyne, one of her consorts collapsed against the wall, gasping like he'd been kicked in the stomach. The other grabbed him by the shoulders before he could fall over. "Tarvek. Breathe."

"I am breathing," Tarvek protested, hissing between his teeth. He clawed at Gil's sleeve, and together they slid slowly down the wall, ending up at the bottom in a tangled heap, Tarvek fighting to keep his head up and resist the urge to lay it on Gil's broad shoulder.

For once Gil didn't snipe at him. All he did was pat Tarvek on the back and wait for him to catch his equilibrium. After a few seconds he pulled away, beaming. 

"You look happy," Tarvek muttered.

"So do you," Gil informed him.

He was, though. The shock of the Doom Bell had worn off and all that was left was the unfamiliar feeling of something having turned out perfectly, and the stupid, soppy smile that was already creeping back onto his face. "Of course I'm happy," Tarvek said, with as much dignity as he could gather. "I've always wanted a daughter."

\--


End file.
